radio
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You are viewing stuff tagged with radio.
I think this is an uptempo house remix of a 70s funk song? Pandora + late night = GET YOUR FUNK ON.
A great Minnesota poet died recently. His name was Bill Holm. Alas, I did not know of him until after his death, when I heard a wonderful tribute to him on April 19, on Minnesota Public Radio Presents. I had just jumped in the shower and (thanks to the shower radio from Kourtni) heard a beautiful poem by another Minnesota poet, Robert Bly. Mr. Bly was reading (with musical backing) some of his works, to honor the late Bill Holm. One of these pieces was particularly beautiful, so I had to give you the opportunity to listen:
This American Life tackles the sub-prime housing market. I’ve read economists writing about this crisis… and it’s rather difficult to understand. I mean, all this talk of AAA overrated paper, etc. — I got a vague idea of the topic, but I wanted something more. Soo, I read a glowing recommendation of This American Life’s coverage of the topic. A quick summary:
Highly dissimilar viewpoints don’t bother me — in fact, I love a good intellectually interesting debate. What does bother me, however, is those who passionately latch on to worldviews with which they are only superficially familiar. In arguments, these people’s only defense consists of sputtering emotionally charged strings of words whose meaning they haven’t investigated and logical fallacies of begging the question, burden of proof, irrelevant conclusion, and verbosity.
Fair to Midland - The local rock station (93x) has been giving a little airtime to an up and coming band (exceedingly rare, since they’re owned by the Clear Channel bastards). So, I finally got a chance to look this band up, and it seems like they’re still pretty low profile.
On the local classic rock station, I heard a song by Carlos Santana today; luckily, I thought I had it in my iTunes library. Headed home, checked, and there it was: “Oye Como Va” from the Best of Santana album. Naturally, I wanted to learn a little more about the guy … I knew he had been around a while and experienced a resurgence in the 90’s. I didn’t realize that his album Supernatural was essentially all collaborations, and pretty good ones, too.
In the central Minnesotan radio market, Clear Channel Communications owns more than one station. Initially, I didn’t think much of this, until I realized truly how many stations it controls: 101.3 KDWB (Top 40), 102.1 K102 (Country), KFAN (AM Sports), KFXN (Sports), 107.9 KQQL (Oldies), 97.1 Cities 97 (Adult Alt.), and 100.3 (News/Talk). If you expand your search across the state, you’ll find 19 stations owned by Clear Channel. Combine this monolithic parent company structure with payola through a third party loophole and non-musical compression techniques, and you have what appears to be a musical wasteland. Grating as it all is, one thing bothers me far more: the capacity to introduce listeners to new music and to provide mechanisms for their feedback is being squandered. The same dang list of songs is being repeated over and over when a simple hour or two per day could be used to facilitate a “we play it and you vote on it online” format. The profits of blaring the same set of songs repeatedly is too attractive to allow for any other methods of playing music.
Mentos in Diet Coke Explodes - An NPR investigation with video and a scientific explanation for this strangeness. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an experiment to do now.
I was going to write a post about how I thought the headline “orange juice futures looking promising” from the Wall Street Journal was funny … but the paper has since gone out for recycling; and when I think about it (like many posts), it really was not the greatest idea. That said, there were a couple of other things that made me laugh the past couple of days. If I could only remember one …
40 Minute Conan O’Brien Interview - Fresh Air plus Conan equals wonderful radio. On the occasion of Conan O’Brien’s 10th anniversary show.
WBGO - The best Jazz station around today. A wonderful “listen online” tool means you don’t have to live in New York to enjoy. I listened to this through many hours of cat dissection in anatomy and physiology.
I just heard this cool song “Men of Station” by a band called 13 & God on our sweet awesome local indie station The Current. Whilst googling to find the name of this band, I ran across a review with a great, albeit complicated, turn of phrase:
Payola - Scroll down to the story on “Payola.” Absolutely fascinating look (through the eyes of Semisonic’s drummer) at the mechanisms of corruption in the radio industry. It is absolutely no wonder we have no variety.